Archive for the T-shirts Category

“Rufus” is a graduate student in his mid-20’s. At the time this story took place, he and his previous girlfriend had broken up just a few months ago. He had been having a bit of a rough time, and needed to take his mind off his troubles. One of his good friends lives in Washington D.C., and when spring came around, he planned a spring break trip to visit the dude. Also in the back of his mind was the fact that another, yet earlier ex-girlfriend lived in the same city.

He had dated this woman, “Lily,” about five years ago. They had only been together for three months, so there wasn’t any intense lingering drama between them. This was good, because relations were cordial. But he hadn’t seen her in all the intervening time, so he didn’t know what to expect. He had in the back of his mind, though, that something might happen between the two of them, as it so often does with exes. As he puts it, “when you have sex, that offer is always on the table.” The two of you have already breached the gap between sexual and non-sexual, and that boundary will evermore seem more mutable than it does with other sorts of people.

Was her offer on the table for him? Rufus sent Lily a Myspace message telling her that he would be in town, and saying “let’s hang out.” Wait a second, I just realized something. Everyone’s raving these days about how Facebook is trendier and Myspace is in decline. But I think Myspace will hang in there, because it’s more conducive to getting you laid. It’s sexier, because it doesn’t offer as many opportunities to reveal your character flaws. With Facebook, you’re online available to chat all the goddamn time, unwittingly showing the world that you lack either the steely resolve to devote your full attention to your work, or the devil-may-care abandon to leave the computer entirely. You join Facebook thinking “this will be a great way to keep in touch with my professional contacts” or some such, but next thing you know, you’ve been sucked into its topsy-turvy madhouse logic, and you’re filling out horrible quizzes on subjects like “How Big a Nerd Are You?”, and everyone can see the results. Beware, youth! The factoids about which you are “updating” your friends are neither charming nor entertainingly quirky; they are the very dregs of your personality! The equivalent of coffee grounds and pizza crusts, they need not be shared with the world. How much better to maintain a dignified reserve. You can e-mail when you have something to say. But Lily and Rufus had been out of touch, she hadn’t spent the past five years hearing about how “Rufus likes the new season of Nip & Tuck” or “Rufus is dubious about these nachos” or whatever, and she was actually curious to see what he was up to. She said she’d meet up with him.

Some weeks previously, Rufus had bought some new shirts at American Apparel. He had a friend who worked there, and she recommended some stuff. One of them was a heathered blue 50/50 shirt, and it quickly became his favorite t-shirt. He brought the new shirts on the trip with him.

Blue AA shirt

Rufus got into town on a Friday. He and the young lady had planned to meet up that night, and went out to dinner at a bistro. They had a nice time, so when his friends wanted to go out drinking, he asked her to join them. The place they went to proved to be a “douchey bar.” Lily invited her friend, and they had a “meeting of the friends.” The situation would have seemed promising, except that Lily had revealed she had a serious boyfriend. But they were in a long-distance relationship! One never knows how such people will behave. Sometimes you ask them how their significant other is doing, and they’re like “I don’t know, I haven’t talked to him in three weeks.” In this case, Rufus and Lily spent some time “reminiscing,” and ended up making out in the bar. Her friend saw it happen and “freaked out.” Lily went home after that, but “it was awesome” nonetheless.

He wanted to see if more would happen, so he called her the next day. They had a brief phone chat, she said she “felt bad” about the making out, and when he invited her to hang out again, “she blew me off.”

Oh, no! But our hero didn’t let this temporary defeat bother him. It was Saturday night, he was feeling fit and confident, and he went out partying again, wearing the favorite blue shirt. He and his friend went out to what he calls a “cheesy-ass club” in Adams Morgan. (But what club? I used to live in that city, so if Rufus remembered specifics, I could make this story all detailed, like Ulysses, but he was maddeningly vague. Perhaps it was Madam’s Organ?)

Great "hilarious" name, guys

At the club, it wasn’t long before a young lady grabbed him and pulled him out onto the dance floor. She was about 5’4″, with an average figure and curly brown hair. She was “cute.” I’ll call her Ramona. They started dancing and making out. She was also making out with her female friend at one point. Then he and she went out to smoke a cigarette, and she said “you should come back to my apartment and fuck me.” He assented to this.

She didn’t mean right away, though — she was just planning ahead. First, they went to another bar, where they hung out in a basement and played songs on a jukebox. (What the hell bar would this have even been? Does Adams Morgan have a basement bar? Did they take U Street to 14th and go to Saint Ex?) Rufus got talking to an Iraq war veteran who had been in Walter Reed hospital, and told him it wasn’t as bad as the media made it out to be. He had been suffering from depression since coming back from Iraq.

Then he (Rufus) and Ramona walked to her apartment to go do their thing. “I was really drunk.” They had to stop at a convenience store to get condoms. It was the kind of place where you have to pick out what you want from a selection behind the counter. The clerk was joking around with them about their condom needs. This sounded to me like an unprofessional thing to do, but Rufus says it was all in fun. He started the joking, being like “oh man, I am gonna fuck you all night long, this is gonna be crazy.” So he bought two 3-packs, just in case.

They went up to her apartment; there was a cat there, and it was hot and dirty, with stuff all over the place. “I didn’t care, I was gettin’ laid.” They had sex with “lots of positions,” and then they “woke up at six and did it again some more.” I would never have known, because he seems so mild-mannered. A gentleman in the streets, a freak in the sheets, that’s him.

Dis-entangling themselves in the morning wasn’t complicated. They woke up and got dressed, she walked him to the nearest subway station as her neighbors were walking back from church, and they said goodbye. This night of consequence-free sex was exactly what he was looking for, and even his therapist told him that “emotionally speaking, it was perfect.”

He never saw Ramona again. He did text her once, just for the hell of it, and she responded with “you should come back.” But he has a new girlfriend now. He met her a few months after the D.C. trip — and he was wearing the same shirt!

The CTGML Facebook Group is up. To the 43% of people who voted in my survey that I shouldn’t start it because it’s a “stupid idea,” sorry. I hate Web 2.0, too, but I hate everything new. Like, if I had been around at the dawn of ink-and-paper writing, I would’ve been all like “God, this sucks! Why can’t we just keep using cuneiform?” Had I been alive in the waning days of the bronze age, I would have proclaimed iron to be “ridiculous.” Seriously, join my Facebook group. The most intelligent people on the internet read this blog, so we’ll have some great discussions there. Possible features the group will include:

— Post links to sexy clothes and hot sales you find online!

— Get fashion advice from lots of stylish ladies! (Straight dudes, this feature could be especially useful to you)

— Official CTGML discussion thread on pickup lines for women to use on men! (Straight dudes, you can help us out here)

Anyway. I encountered the following in Hannah Holmes’ bookThe Well-Dressed Ape: “While some researchers see copulation as the culmination of the negotiations, others suspect it may be just another way for animals to gauge one another’s quality…. Why [do people like to have sex all the time]? Is it a test of a partner’s quality? Some theorists think a roll in the hay might be a good way to gauge another human’s health and personality.” Sound familiar, ladies? Little did you know that all your casual sex was a brilliant Darwinian strategy.

But the tactic of hookup-as-relationship-test works even if your pairing is unlikely to produce offspring. Like the subjects of today’s story, “Heidi,” a musician, and “Gretchen,” a friend of the dudes in Heidi’s band. The two of them moved in the same social circles, and finally met one night last October, at a sleazy local dive bar (“The Buckaroo”). Gretchen is tall and skinny, “very androgynous,” and it seems Heidi was attracted right from the beginning. That night, it happened to be Gretchen’s birthday, and the whole gang ended up going to a different, moderately less dive-y bar to celebrate. “I bought her a shot of whiskey.” Along with Levi’s jeans and Chucks, Heidi was wearing an airbrushed Cher t-shirt that said “Gurlz rule.” Gretchen was a fellow appreciator of Cher, so this helped them build rapport.

Sonny & Cher

Another one

At the end of the evening, “we just crashed on a friend’s couch.” A dude who lived nearby offered up his couch and floors to the few who were still out partying. Hooking up came fairly naturally once they were in a room together. Heidi was lying on a blanket on the floor, and said “do you wanna lay down here?” They ended up fooling around. She says “it was great sexy times.”

Three or four days passed before they saw each other again. This time, it was Halloween. Heidi and her friends went out to a dance party being held in a warehouse. She was disguised as Ursula from the Little Mermaid, in full purple body paint, silver spray-painted hair, and tentacles constructed from pantyhose filled with packing peanuts.

Heidi is slimmer than this, though

She was wearing a black skirt with some sort of halter top, accessorized with a golden crown and trident, and red lipstick.

Gold crown

(I had, like, heck of problems finding the right kind of trident online. Free market, my ass. You’re on your own with this one.)

YSL red lipstick

As Heidi walked into the warehouse, the music hit a lull, “everyone in the room turned and stared at me, and it was like, ‘Yes!'” Among those at the party, “this particular girl turned and noticed me.” Gretchen was dressed as Ziggy Stardust. She was wearing tight jeans with a ball of yarn in the crotch, and had the lightning bolt painted on her face. They ended up dancing for a bit to “raunchy hip-hop” that the DJ was playing.

The party was “crazy.” Eventually they left, of course. Once again, they crashed at someone’s house, their friend “purple Siberian tiger” (for such was his costume). This is one of those cases where my notes are hard to read, but I think Purple Siberian Tiger slept on the sofa, letting them have the bed? It could be. Anecdotal evidence I’ve heard suggests that guys are only too eager to let lesbian couples hook up in their bed, if they get all horny at a party or something. It is one of the few compensations for the crushing burden of homophobia that queer people must bear in our regressive, reactionary society.

Anyway, having fooled around enough to verify each other’s quality, health and personality, they were ready to have sex. That’s what my notes appear to suggest, anyway. But I realized I wasn’t sure what that implies, since the distinction between “fooling around” and “going all the way” isn’t so clear in a lesbian context as it is with straight people. To gain insight into the “gay lifestyle,” I asked a bisexual woman. She says: “With a guy, my vocab distinctions would be: ‘I made out with him,’ or ‘ I hooked up with him’ (which would involve oral sex either way, or finger fucking), or ‘I had sex with him’ (which would be like, regular penis vagina sex). With a girl, my distinctions would be more like, ‘I made out with her” or ‘I had sex with her.’ The stuff that wouldn’t count as much as sex with guys would count as sex with girls. Some girls might say going down is a bigger deal than fingering and that that counts more as sex.” Also, it “probably” makes a difference whether they’re fully nude. So there you have it.

The two of them continued to date for “a short while,” and then Gretchen cut it off, saying “I’m not really looking to date anybody.” Heidi has seen her around town recently, they’re friendly and everything’s cool. When I asked her if the clothes had any effect, she said “absolutely,” and that there were “many references” made between them while they were dating to the Ursula and Ziggy costumes.

Who likes sex more, men or women? An ancient Greek dude would tell you would tell you that women enjoy it, like, a thousand times more. (If you need confirmation, just check out this myth — yes, Sophocles fans, it explains why Tiresias the blind prophet has boobs in Oedipus Rex.) But if you pose the same question to the average person in today’s late capitalist society, they’ll tell you just the opposite. Males, they will say, are single-minded because they’re biologically driven to pursue sex. Devoid of finer feelings, they comport themselves in much the same manner as sperm competing for an egg. So simple are males, so in their quest for poontang, that they offer nothing to the analytical mind. “It’s a waste of time trying to understand US!”, men will say. “We’re all dogs!”

By contrast, this theory (call it the “men are horny, women are corny” proposition) paints females as complex and mysterious — their sexuality a mere facade, a smokescreen behind which lurks a roiling turmoil of feelings, thoughts, and finely-calibrated emotional needs. Oh, no! That sounds so boring! But can the theory be true?

I say no. And it turns out insight into male complexity can come from surprising places. Case in point: the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. I used to have a big problem with this magazine. The reason why is obvious: I considered it intellectually dishonest. Masturbating isn’t really a sport. (Insert 50,000 jokes here about sports injuries, mouthguards, shin splints, balls, bats, nets, baskets, bases and home runs, pentathlons, varsity vs. junior varsity-level athletes, what you played in high school, what you played at summer camp, shuttlecocks, bowling pins, fencing masks, boxing gloves, ping-pong tables, and cheerleading.) If pornography is what you want — my reasoning went — go to the porno shop and buy some! You’re not fooling anyone! Do you think you’re too upper-middle-class to go to the Hustler store? God, you’re so bourgeois!

Who cares, though, really? The magazine provides work for models in today’s challenging economy, and it’s good for the Jews because there’s an Israeli on the cover. More important, though, is what happened when I mentioned this objection to my friend Isaac. He had something interesting to say: “For some men,” he explained, “that’s part of the turn-on.” Appreciating the magazine in a sexual way comes with more of a perverse, illicit thrill because “it’s not really ‘for’ that.” The women seem innocent and unsuspecting. And “believe it or not, boobs have to have a context, even for guys.”

Boobs with a context

Oh, I believe it. What an unexpected nuance! But for every worldly man like Isaac, there are ten guys who want to reduce human sexuality to black and white. The subject of today’s story kept insisting that men and women are fundamentally different, because in the world of sex, “women choose, men are chosen.” Does his story bear out that claim? Let’s find out.

“Sigmund” is a Jew from New Jersey. He grew up in New York and moved to L.A. as a young man to pursue acting. In 2002, he met “Cherry” in a bar where he worked. They got friendly because they were co-workers. “She was cute, like an ice cream cone.” They had all kinds of rapport because they had the same favorite movie (The Karate Kid). Also, “I taught her how to text.” During that historical epoch, most people were confused by text messaging; having mastered the skill demonstrated that he was an alpha male.

His strategy bore fruit a few weeks later, when Cherry was out on a date with some other guy, but was “texting me through the date.” It’s unclear what the matter was with the date. “It didn’t even suck, I was just better.”

So inevitably, he asked her out. He rented both the Karate Kid movies and she walked over to his apartment, because they both lived in East Hollywood. They got halfway through the sequel before they started making out. After a while she was like “I have to go home,” and he drove her home. But then they had sex on another date a few days later, on the same movie-watching sofa. (“I slayed many on that couch.”)

He was wearing a black crew-neck shirt, Levi’s, and Vans, with muttonchop sideburns and long curly hair.

Black t-shirt

Slip-on Vans

They kept on dating for six months. In this story, Sigmund defeated his male rival and won the girl, so it looks pretty good for his sperm-and-egg theory. But what if we look closer? Cherry must have really liked this guy, because it seems like she went out of her way to make him jealous. Going out on a stupid date with another dude she didn’t really like, then sneaking away every 10 minutes to text him? It totally worked, though. Guys, look at how much effort it takes to seduce you. You can’t be all that simple.

“Anita” is in her early 20s and works as a vintage clothing seller. (She requested this pseudonym; it’s kind of weird for me because my mom is named Anita, but I was like “okay.”) I talked to her the other night, and she told me about a fateful series of events that took place about six months ago — on what I would call a “memorable night,” except that, as with many of the people I talk to, she only remembers about half of it.

Anita was single at the time, although casually dating several guys. (She’s very petite and small in stature! Does this ever happen to taller women?) Her ex-boyfriend had a friend that she was trying to be buddies with; she saw him around a lot or whatever, and she had suggested that they should hang out some time. She wasn’t trying to have it off with him, though; she just thought he was a fun guy.

The first time she suggested getting together, he didn’t have time. Then a few nights later, he was having people over to his apartment, and he called her to say “come over, let’s hang out.” She showed up wearing cowboy boots, skinny Levi’s jeans, and an 80s concert t-shirt.

Cowboy boots

She wouldn’t tell me what the 80’s concert was, apparently on the grounds that it would be too identifying (?). However, RANT OF THE DAY: Can people please shut the hell up about “80’s music”? When anyone uses this phrase, as far as I can tell, they seem to be talking about a particular style of glossy synthesizer pop music that was popular in that decade. Like, Wham! and Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Spandau Ballet and whatever the fuck. WARNING, CHALLENGING OPINION ALERT, that style of music totally sucks. It’s crappy and overproduced, plus the drums sound too “wet.” Time spent talking about “80’s music” is wasted time that could have been employed discussing an actual good band! Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds put out like ten records in the 80’s,so if you’re going to fetishize a decade, why don’t you talk about them? Talk about Tom Waits or something. Also, I hate the saxophone solo in “Careless Whispers.” Seriously, “80’s music” needs to suck my balls. Here are some concert t-shirts from the nineteen-eighties that I would condone wearing.

Flipper still rules

Butthole Surfers

Anita’s new friend “Gibby” had a bunch of his dudes over, watching episodes of The Office (American version). She brought over a “huge bottle of Gentleman Jack” and proceeded to drink it straight up. Gibby was drinking the whiskey too, I think. Time passed. At one point, Gibby went into the kitchen to get another drink, and she went with him. She kissed him and they started making out. She hadn’t ever been interested in him before, and attributes what happened to beer goggles (“Gentleman Jack spectacles”?).

They went back out into the living room and acted normal around Gibby’s friends, as one does. Then eventually, he decided to go to bed, and told her, “come in there when you’re ready.” So that’s what she did — she went into his bedroom, and they had sex. She says “it was a success.”

It is unclear what all the other dudes were doing while this was going on; maybe they had gone home. This part of the story is kind of weird. And what makes it even odder is, Anita revealed that it was still only 10 p.m. when they got done having sex! I was confused by this at first, because I couldn’t understand why Gibby went to bed so early. Now I think I know the reason, though. I think that “going to bed” was just a ploy he used to get laid. I know, right? Can you imagine? What kind of man would do such a thing? Shocking, but in any case, Anita had no urge to sleep over there. “I was just done, and then I left.”

She went home and changed clothes, into a floral sundress, with the same boots and no underwear.

Floral sundress

Forever 21 dress

She phoned up some good friends and they told her they were at a popular local billiard hall, “Tight Pocket Billiards.” She drove over, joined them, and started drinking again. It was there that she met “Charlie,” a friend of her friends who was partying with them. When she first spotted him, she mistook him for someone she had met before, so she was like “hey, you’re Kurt.” He was like “no,” but they struck up a conversation.

Shortly thereafter, she “asked him to take me home.” It struck me that this story was missing the part where the two folks go from shaking hands to going home to fuck. “What did you talk about?”, I asked. She said they didn’t talk much, and that it was basically a matter of “chemistry” between them. Furthermore, “when you have sex, you want more.”

And so it came to pass that they went to his apartment and had the “best sex ever.” Chemistry doesn’t lie! A surprising fact about this interview is that Charlie was there while I was conducting it (we were at a fashion party). He had been talking to someone else, but wandered over at this point. Anita kept emphasizing that it was “seriously, the best sex ever.” Charlie seemed more pleased than otherwise to be associated with an activity like this. He says that when they met, he was wearing a black Nirvana t-shirt, probably with jeans and Pumas.

Vintage shirt

Charlie didn’t call her back for two weeks after that, but she says they are now “best friends” who also have great sex. Looking at my archives, this has happened before, that someone had better luck when they went out for the second time in one night. I mentioned it to Georgiana, and she thinks it is because of, quote, “pheromones.” You leave the house all smeared with your own sex pheromones, and you attract someone whose body chemicals and hormones are all matched up with yours. Right?

Welcome to the first “Goth Edition” of CTGML! Loyal reader “Lydia” wondered whether I was interested in her goth stories, and my answer was: of course! In fact, I think it would be fun to do a series of these, focusing on different musical subgenres and the styles that are associated with them: prog, krautrock, Americana, freak-folk, yacht rock, and so on. We could learn about different cultures together. You know what genre I bet has the worst clothes? Hick-hop, that’s what.

Lydia is in her late 30’s and lives in a part of New York that’s not NYC. Two months before this story starts, she had been dumped by her boyfriend of six months. She explains that “he was the first boyfriend subsequent to my divorce, and the dumping was an unpleasant surprise. I hadn’t had any action since then; I wasn’t totally ready to jump into a new relationship, but I was open to possibilities.”

Such was her from of mind when she went out one night to dance with friends at “Release the Bats” (“local, tiny and pathetic, now defunct Goth night”; not its actual name). She was wearing a black leather biker jacket with one-inch band buttons pinned to it, “20-eye Docs and fishnets and the little Tripp skirt with purple plaid trim and a black cami,” and was “eyelinered all to hell and gone.”

Black silk camisole

Black and purple miniskirt

Tall Doc Martins

Why can’t I find a biker jacket online that looks as good as the one Kate Moss is wearing in this photo? All the designer-y ones are too weird and don’t resemble the classic style enough. Anyhow, here is an affordable option.

Black leather motorcycle jacket

Lydia got to the club shortly after doors opened, talked to a few friends, had a couple of drinks, and danced with her friend “Lenora” to songs like “Bizarre Love Triangle.” There were a couple of cute guys there, one of whom caught her eye because he looked at first glance like her friend “DJ Knobgoblin” (not his actual DJ pseudonym). On closer inspection, he turned out to be a guy she’d never met.

She ended up talking to him later, though: Tthe song “Barracuda” came on and Lydia commented “that that was KARAOKE, not dance music. Because it’s such an old song, I guess that was what started the ‘no, how old are you?’ conversation this time.” The DJ Knobgoblin lookalike was hanging around near her and Lenora, and somehow ended up joining in this discussion. As she describes him, he had hair in “the classic Robert Smith mode. Eyeliner. Long black coat with a laced back. Black t-shirt. Vinyl Tripp pants that laced up the sides, rawr. And New Rocks.”

Vinyl pants, not the same ones though

Lancôme eyeliner

His name was “Edgar.” She was 36 at the time, but “he guessed me at 22, not my vanity prompting, but more grown out of the music discussion… of course he turned the question around on me, and, honestly, with all the eyeliner, he could have been any age, so I said ’27’ which is usually safe.” He was 35, and “said he was flattered.”

As you might expect, “we started chatting. He offered to buy me a drink, and I accepted, although perhaps I shouldn’t have, as that made it my third, and I’m a lightweight.” Aww. “But we were having a good conversation, and I was having a great time. He admitted, as if it were slightly embarrassing, that he was one of those goths with a real job — a vet. Ooh, gainfully employed! When I admitted to a real job, too, he asked what I did, and when he heard baker, he said ‘Marry me!'” She adds that “my job gets that response a LOT.”

Flirting between these two was getting more intense as they found out how much they had in common. They talked about geeky, Star Wars-y stuff, and he revealed that he was divorced, too. “Neither of us does drugs any more” — or so he claimed! — “although the drugs he doesn’t do any more are not the same ones that I don’t do any more.”

She also noted that “he dances WELL. Not just the punch-the-hobbit-dropkick-the-hobbit industrial-boy style, either. Old school gothiness. But understands how to shift from the usual goth ‘no I am not looking at anyone else dance just see me not look *peek*’ to dancing WITH someone.” I feel like I’m in a new world, of aesthetic standards that I didn’t even know existed. This multiculturalism thing is working!

“I forget what we were talking about when he asked if he could kiss me. I do remember thinking ‘you actually need to ask?’ but I said yes, and, mmm. So nice to get the attention. The universe listened and sent me the boy in eyeliner I wanted!”

When it was time go, Lydia wasn’t sober enough to drive yet. They decided they could go for coffee in his car, and he could drive her back to hers later, so they went to a local diner. “I had hot chocolate with whipped cream, because I was pretty sure coffee would make me jittery, and he had cheese fries (although I tried to warn him it’d be nacho goo on them) and a Coke.” A baker and a veterinarian, having cheese fries and cocoa at a diner? I didn’t know that was part of the Goth lifestyle, because they never write songs about that. Nobody writes songs that adorable. Even goddamn Beat Happening would have been like “we can’t do this song, it isn’t edgy enough.”

“I said ‘let me see if I can do this without getting whipped cream on my nose,’ which meant treating it kind of like an ice cream cone, to which he said ‘now you’re just teasing me.’ My response was ‘and it’s not even a cherry stem!’ He admitted to cheating, in earlier times, by hiding a pre-tied cherry stem in his mouth.”” I guess this part’s kind of edgy. “As we were driving back to the club to get my car, I asked if he was driving back home then, or following me, or what? He said ‘are you inviting me?’ I said, ‘I’m inviting you.’ He was pleased.”

“There are few things more fraught with silly than two laced-up goths getting undressed for bed, let me tell you.” After dealing with her boots, she took off her last few things in the bathroom, grabbed a condom, and emerged wearing a paisley satin robe. He was still wearing his vinyl pants and socks. “I cuddled up next to him, and the smooches began in earnest. He had his hand tangled into my hair, pretty strongly. Melt!”

“Wasn’t long before he discovered the nekkid under the bathrobe, and commented on it. My response was ‘and you’re overdressed.'” The rest of the clothes came off. Lydia says that Edgar “had skills” and that his tongue piercing “rocked [her] world.” “When I went for the condom, though, he said no”; He gave her some whole explanation about how he really liked her, and would want to take her on a date before having sex. “More cuddling and kissing, and eventually sleep.”

He left in the morning with a terrible hangover, and promised to call if he wasn’t dead. “I played happy music while I was at work — for my values of happy: the Cure’s “Head on the Door,” Elvis Costello’s “My Aim is True,” the Horrorpops, the Raveonettes.” Hmmm, I suppose that’s pretty happy. Like, if you ranked all the music in the world according to how cheerful it was, and you gave a ten to “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy” by The Ohio Express, and a zero to “Raping a Slave” by Swans, then Elvis Costello or the Raveonettes would probably get about a six. (One of today’s elecronic DJ “mashup” artists should consider doing a mashup of “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy” and “Raping a Slave”; it would probably get a lot of attention.)

In the next couple of days, she exchanged a few texts with him, and ended up hanging out at his place soon after. “We didn’t exactly DATE, although we hung out and fooled around a couple more times in the next month. ” It all came to and end when he stood her up for a party she’d asked him to, and gave a suspicious-sounding excuse. She started asking around about him, “at which point I had the glorious experience of four people telling me separately, ‘Oh, HIM? He’s an asshole,’ and going into detail about the coke habit and some of his past exploits.” He wasn’t even a vet, just a vet tech!

If you’re a less copious drinker than most of my readers, you might find this helpful: “For a while, I had a really good line for declining a third drink. Oh, no, two’s my limit. Know what I did the last time I had three drinks?’ (pause) ‘Edgar.'”

**** Thanks to Emel for coming up with the name “DJ Knobgoblin.” If any real DJs out there want to use this, it’s all yours.

A church sign I drive past on the way to my house is claiming that A CHRISTMAS WITHOUT CHRIST IS NO CHRISTMAS AT ALL. I am sure many of my readers disagree with that sentiment; instead, many of you might feel that a Christmas without hot gay sex is no Christmas at all. Does that make you any less of an American? No! There’s no red America and blue America; there’s no “real” America and “fake” America. Our union was founded on the idea of personal freedom. Whether your lifestyle is based on a tight-knit nuclear family, a loving gay relationship, or going to Paris and screwing a bunch of 90-year-old whores like Ben Franklin did, nobody has the right to put down your values.

So if you hate going home for the holidays because it’s so boring, perhaps you can take inspiration from today’s story. “Walter” describes himself as “a bisexual, atheist, vegetarian, college student, liberal South Carolinian. Thought it was a stereotype until you got to that last bit, uh huh.” Oh, no! This country’s demographic map is shifting! The Republican party has lost the trust of the citizens! The only way to get Walter to understand traditional “South Carolina” values is for William Kristol to write another of his insightful articles. William Kristol had better hurry, because Walter really needs it:

“I was visiting my dad over Thanksgiving break and quickly grew weary of my stepmother, who has hair resembling calcified 7-layer dip. I went over to a friend’s apartment to have a few drinks, one of these never-left-the-hometown wretches who ends up working at a CostCo ‘distribution center,’ suddenly drops the ‘g’ off of the end of every word, and develops killer abs.”

Walter explains that “we were good friends in high school who grew apart during college. It got awkward with him for a number of reasons — we only really saw each other when we were going to hook up, and he has turned into a bit of a stoner over the years (not my style).” But Killer Abs texted him at 10 p.m. asking him if he wanted to come over for a few drinks, and he ended up going over there a few hours later.

Over at the apartment, under the influence of “a few too many Svetka and tonics,” Walter “made the first move. We were watching TV in his living room and it was clear neither of us was incredibly interested in what was on. I suggested that we move upstairs and he was happy to oblige.” These small-town guys “ended up doing some not-so-small-town sorts of things. This is all unbeknowdst to my frat-tastic college boyfriend, with whom I was supposed to spend the day (albeit secretly) just a few hours later.” Here’s Walter had on:

This picture makes me very nervous, and I don’t much care for it. However, I suppose that’s what “killer abs” really look like.

American Apparel white t-shirt

That’s more like it!

Walter concludes, “I didn’t end up seeing the boyfriend until the next day. Everything’s been fine. He’s a great guy. I don’t think Killer Abs was a great idea, but it is what happened, and it was pretty hot. Killer Abs, for the record, was wearing jeans, a white t-shirt, and a pair of tennis shoes (he had worked earlier in the day). Blue collar chic? Is that a phrase?” I would think so, yes, but when I did a Google image search on “blue collar fashion” I came upon this, one of the least blue-collar looks of all time: